Wednesday, October 30, 2013

There are two mysterious structures built on barges, one in San Francisco Bay, the other in Maine’s Portland Harbor. We know Google is behind both of them, but the company has been silent on details. Most believe the barges will host data centers on water — which the company has a patent for — or serve as floating stores for Google products.

Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as Stanford grad students. Their company often tries radical things such as Project Loon (yes, that’s the official name), which strives to deliver balloon-powered Internet.

There really isn’t much we don’t know about Google and LG’s new Nexus 5 at this point — a leaked service manual blew the door open on plenty of technical details, and Google even “accidentally” outed the device in the Google Play Store, giving us a $349 price tag for the base 16GB model.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the Nexus 5′s long journey from rumor to actual product, the Android 4.4 KitKat device is said to sport a 4.95-inch display running at 1080p and a quad-core Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.3GHz. Oh, and let’s not forget 2GB of RAM, an active LTE radio, and a mildly improved 2300mAh battery — all told we’re looking at a pretty solid update.

Qt Enterprise Embedded architecture Digia announced an Android and Linux-targeted embedded version of its cross-platform Qt GUI framework called Qt Enterprise Embedded that combines a Qt Creator based IDE with a new embedded Boot to Qt stack. The Digia-backed Qt project also released the beta of Qt 5.2 with a new Scene Graphic renderer and the first production-ready support for Android and iOS.

Google will swap Glass Explorer Edition users headsets for an updated model from November, an optional refresh of the hardware that will support prescription lenses among other things, along with adding a broader invite system to get more testers up and running with the wearable. “We are always improving the software based on Explorers’ feedback,” Google said today and this time, we’ve made some improvements to the hardware.” Meanwhile, all Explorer Program members will be offered the chance to invite up to three people to buy Glass of their own.

Supposedly when they order it online, and at $1,500 apiece that means it’ll still be a toy for the well-heeled or businesses hoping to get on the Glass development bandwagon.

The retail Mac Pro will go on sale in December, priced from a not-inconsiderable $2,999.

That base configuration will include a 3.7GHz quad Xeon

with 12GB DRAM, dual FirePro D300 graphics cards each

with 2GB, and a 256GB SSD for storage.

However, Apple will offer up to 12-core processors, up to 64GB of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC memory, and even more potent graphics, though exact pricing for the maximum specification machines has not been confirmed.

Regular buyers will get a black, gloss-finished anodized casing, just 25.1cm tall and using an innovative

Before you all run out and buy one, though, ask yourself one question: Do you have a graphics card that’s actually capable of outputting 4K?

4K gaming, on the other hand, is another situation entirely. Short of the most powerful ($1,000+) graphics cards, there is nothing on the market that even comes close to running modern games at 4K. At 3840×2160, GPUs have to drive four times the number of pixels as 1920×1080. A few months ago we tested the GTX Titan, GTX 680, and Radeon 7970 on a triple-monitor 5760×1080 setup; Titan was the only GPU that came close to pulling it off… and 4K is 25% more pixels than 5760×1080!

Saturday, October 26, 2013

An earthquake of 7.3 magnitude has hit 231 miles (371 kilometers) east of Japan’s Honshu Island with tremors felt in Tokyo. The quake prompted an evacuation at the devastated Fukushima Daiichi plant and sent tsunami fears across 5 prefectures.

The quake struck at a depth of 10 kilometers at 17:10 GMT, 320 kilometers southeast of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture, according to the US Geological Survey. Strong tremors could be felt on Japan’s main Honshu Island, as well as on the northern island of Hokkaido.

A tsunami advisory was issued following the quake. The wave was due to hit at 17:42 GMT in the Fukushima region, the Japanese Weather Agency predicted. The agency issued a "yellow" warning meaning the tsunami was not expected to exceed a height of 1 meter.

Local media reports, that some 6,000 households were urged to evacuate in Kamaishi, Iwate Pref. amid tsunami fears.

Now, with quicker and ( I think ) smoother Lines. (Yes YD is a talking dog with a generic tablet) and has lots of Ideas about how "badly" different agencies are running things in business (wall street) and Washington.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

This week the folks at AT&T have announced that they’ll be bringing the next-generation ATIV S Neo to the market with Samsung’s manufacturing finesse. This Windows Phone 8 device will be bringing on a 4.77-inch HD display with an 8 megapixel camera on its back and a 1.9 megapixel camera up front. This device will also be coming with a set of built-in apps like the full Microsoft Office suite.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Documentary:It's Was pretty tough to make the unfinished movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote by Terry Gilliam (Monty Python), See:

Lost in La Mancha.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quirky, and very off-beat but still touching...

Surprising subtle film with a different David Carradine character as Cowboy Bob....in Camille:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Original Swedish version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy."

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The two-week government shutdown paralyzed the vast majority of NASA for the first half of October, leaving only a skeleton crew of essential staff to keep things

running and make sure the folks on the International Space Station have a few familiar, gravity-bound voices to talk to. But MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, was also deemed essential enough to escape the shutdown and today remains on schedule for launch next month.

MAVEN program manager Guy Beutelschies at Lockheed Martin LMT -2.79% told me that thanks to “some long nights and weekend work, we are on track for meeting the originally planned date of Nov. 1 for the start of launch vehicle integration.”

Thanks to a seemingly rare moment of clear-eyed bureaucratic prioritizing, billions already invested into the exploration of Mars will not be scuttled and by the second half of next year MAVEN should be in place to give us another eye on Mars.

After selling RedLaser – a mobile shopping and scanning application – to eBay, Powers, who co-founded the company after quitting his doctorate program at the University of Michigan, started work on Structure eighteen months ago. Several iterations and a headcount increase from five to thirteen people at Occipital later, the 3D scanner is ready. The results show.

It has a PrimeSense Carmine sensor, which, in case you didn’t know, is the same sensor used in Microsoft MSFT -0.09%’s Kinect devices. The scanner can be mounted onto an iPad with custom brackets (supplied with the scanner) and works through iOS and OSx applications. According to Powers, the company intends to release open source Android drivers soon.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Apple's iPhone event last month was undoubtedly crucial for the company, but it left quite a few would-be customers wanting more. Much of Cupertino's product lineup is practically begging for an update. There haven't been new iPads in a year; both OS X Mavericks and the Mac Pro redesign have yet to ship; and two Mac lines are still stuck on last year's CPUs. As such, Apple likely isn't being hyperbolic when it claims that it has "a lot to cover" at its October 22nd event.

This week the folks at NVIDIA have done a demonstration of G-Sync with the G-Sync Module, their newest in graphics technology to drive forward the universe of gaming graphics. Here we’re seeing a G-Sync-equipped ASUS monitor next to a unit without, the both of them running the same technology otherwise. This piece of hardware – hidden here – is the G-Sync module, turning the monitor into a slave to the graphics processor inside the PC.

Above you’re also seeing the G-Sync Module itself. This module will be sold to hardware manufacturers and implanted in gaming monitors soon – we’ll see who picks up on the next-generation graphics trend.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a new line of Linux-ready, embedded-focused QorIQ system-on-chips based on a new ARM-compatible, core-agnostic Layerscape architecture. The first three QorIQ LS1 SoCs offer dual ARM Cortex-A7 cores clocked at up to 1GHz, and include networking-, display-, and cost-optimized models featuring 2-3 Watts power consumption.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Sony Pictures Television will become the first big Hollywood studio to produce a new TV show for Netflix, underscoring how the TV industry's elite are starting to view the streaming video service as a launch pad for original series.

Sony Pictures Television will become the first big Hollywood studio to produce a new TV show for Netflix Inc., underscoring how the TV industry’s elite are starting to view the streaming-video service as a launch pad for original series.

Sony Corp.’s TV studio, maker of hit shows such as AMC’s“Breaking Bad” and this year’s new NBC drama “The Blacklist,” said Monday it will begin production early next year on a psychological thriller for Netflix from the creators of the FX legal drama “Damages.”

About Me

I started in computing selling the TRS-80 many years ago in the early 80's and got hooked when I bought my own Coco (Color Computer). I've had a computer ever since.
I write short SF stories and Linux/OpenSource articles. I'm on Twitter as: http://twitter.com/ErnieMLopez/